It was what Strether had rather bewilderedly to go to bed on.

                                       II

 
It really looked true moreover from the way Chad was to behave after this. He
was full of attentions to his mother's ambassador; in spite of which, all the
while, the latter's other relations rather remarkably contrived to assert
themselves. Strether's sittings pen in hand with Mrs. Newsome up in his own room
were broken, vet they were richer; and they were more than ever interspersed
with the hours in which he reported himself, in a different fashion, but with
scarce less earnestness and fulness, to Maria Gostrey. Now that, as he would
have expressed it, he had really something to talk about he found himself, in
respect to any oddity that might reside for him in the double connexion, at once
more aware and more indifferent. He had been fine to Mrs. Newsome about his
useful friend, but it had begun to haunt his imagination that Chad, taking up
again for her benefit a pen too long disused, might possibly be finer. It
wouldn't at all do, he saw, that anything should come up for him at Chad's hand
but what specifically was to have come; the greatest divergence from which would
be precisely the element of any lubrication of their intercourse by levity. It
was accordingly to forestall such an accident that he frankly put before the
young man the several facts, just as they had occurred, of his funny alliance.
He spoke of these facts, pleasantly and obligingly, as the whole story, and felt
that he might qualify the alliance as funny if he remained sufficiently grave
about it. He fllattered himself that he even exaggerated the wild freedom of his
original encounter with the wonderful lady; he was scrupulously definite about
the absurd conditions in which they had made acquaintance - their having picked
each other up almost in the street; and he had (finest inspiration of all!) a
conception of carrying the war into the enemy's country by showing surprise at
the enemy's ignorance.
    He had always had a notion that this last was the grand style of fighting;
the greater therefore the reason for it, as he couldn't remember that he had
ever before fought in the grand style. Every one, according to this, knew Miss
Gostrey: how came it Chad didn't know her? The difficulty, the impossibility,
was really to escape it; Strether put on him, by what he took for granted, the
burden of proof of the contrary. This tone was so far successful as that Chad
quite